Government department spent hundreds of millions to move to Windows 10 – and it’s only just finished

Defra’s £312 million move to an out-of-support OS

The Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has invested heavily into Windows 10, just as Microsoft ends support for the ageing OS.

According to a letter from David Hill, Defra’s interim permanent secretary, to Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee (PAC), the department has spent £312 million on IT estate modernisation in the current spending review period (2022-2023 to 2024-2025).

Part of that spent was upgrading “obsolete” devices and software, including removing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops from the estate and upgrading to Windows 10.

The money also allowed Defra to tackle 49,000 vulnerabilities, migrate 137 legacy applications to modern infrastructure, close one legacy datacentre (with plans for three more) and deploy a new security solution for ageing servers.

However, the decision to deploy an operating system that is almost a month past the end of free support is sure to raise questions about efficient use of taxpayer funds.

Defra continues modernisation journey

The letter outlines the next stage of Defra’s plans, which include moving business-critical applications to the cloud; prioritising cyber risk mitigation; and replacing end-of-life hardware, “including 24,000 devices, 26,000 smartphones and network infrastructure.”

These are presumably devices too old to be upgraded to a more modern OS. While it is good that Defra is aware of the scale of the estate revamp, such massive hardware refreshes often come in over time and budget.

The department also intends to raise efficiency by removing paper forms and investing in automation and AI to both improve the customer experience and reduce costs.

If Defra can follow through with the ambitions Hill sets out in his letter, it should help to move the department away from a long tail of technical debt.

That said, we hope its ambitions don’t end at Windows 10.